Increase Your Blog Traffic with Google Groups

If you already have a Gmail (or Google) account, then the hard part is out of the way. Google Groups are like a blend between message boards and e-mail lists, where various topics can be discussed. Not only can you learn a lot and establish yourself using Groups, you can also build traffic to your blog.

Initially, you may not be a member of any Groups, however, you can quickly change that by browsing the various groups by category or doing a search. Try to find groups that have active discussions and that spark your interest. Once you’ve chosen a few groups, I’ll provide you with some tips for making the most of them.

Give Your Profile Some Attention

Before you jump into all the discussions, it’s a good idea to fill out your profile so when people begin to wonder about who you are (and if you participate enough, they will), they’ll know how to find your website. To spark additional interest, you may want to add a picture to your profile as well.

Discover Blog Topics

People are usually asking plenty of questions in Google Groups and if you happen to know the answer, great. You can respond to the group, but you can take it beyond the group by polishing up the answer and blogging it. Of course, it should go without saying that you shouldn’t reveal any personal information about the inquirer.

A discussion may even spark a heated debate that you can chime in on from your blog, and also get a wider group of people involved. Be sure that you also check the group’s rules to make sure that certain topics aren’t confidential and to be contained within the group environment first.

Contribute to the Discussion

You don’t have to be a know it all to participate in the rhetoric. Ask questions or garner opinions about a topic. Whenever the opportunity does come up to answer a question, do so. And don’t be afraid to put your opinion out there in an open discussion.

Add a Tasteful Signature

Your signature doesn’t need to be big and flashy to get noticed. Simply signing your name, followed by your web address, should be enough. If you participate regularly and offer insightful commentary, people will be more inclined to click through to see what else you have to offer.

But, before you run off to start crafting your new signature, make sure that the group you’ve joined allows them. Some groups specifically request that you don’t use signatures or that you keep them under a certain number of lines.

Play By the Rules

This is common sense, but bears repeating. Various groups will have their own code of conduct. Not playing by the rules can land you in a kettle of hot water. You may end up being labeled a spammer or kicked out by the group admin.

Conduct yourself as you would being a guest in someone’s home, and you can’t go wrong. If you keep your nose clean, get involved, and show others that you are passionate about a topic, then you’ll be opening many doors for networking and growing your website.

Hi Alex,
Thanks for coming by and commenting. Glad the post could remind you of another channel to promote your blog.

By the way, took a peek and it’s a great blog — especially love the entry on making the perfect play dough. I’m thinking, with a little tweaking and baking, it could also make some decent sculpting material.

AFAIK, Google Accounts don’t expire or go on hiatus if you don’t log in for a while (this was a surprise to me when I logged into a Google account I hadn’t used for at least a year and everything was still in pristine condition).

So, if you have a Google account, just log in, go to GG and start making friends.

its really a great post for newbie’s in SEO. Great information about blogging through Google Goups. Blog’s posting is really dragging a great traffic to website. Hope yours is good post to increase traffic for a website through qualtiy blog using Google Group.

This is a really good idea. Some people use yahoo answers to get interest in their sites, but I think google groups is a much better idea. You can get more personal connections with people, and better grouping by interest. Just like digg or another web 2.0 site, getting the most traffic from these sites is about creating valuable content that connects with the readers.

Hi I saw blogger.com users using google groups to send their email newsletter. They have a subscribe box and then posts are send to subscribers via google groups.
1) I was wondering if you know how this is done for wordpress.
2) I notice you have a weekly blog news update. Can you share with me what you are using. I am familiar with feedburner, feedblitz and aweber.
Thanks for the ideas.
Johan

I’m thinking of joining Google Groups, Yahoo & MSN. Then, when I respond to any kind of “group” question or answer, I’ll do the response on my blog. I can then use ping.fm to post not only to my groups, but also to Facebook & Twitter, with a link back to my blog. This way when I ask or answer a question in one group i can share it with people accross networks. Of course over-use of ping.fm may appear spammy so I will be doing so carefully. I’ll try to give an update here.

Someone here mentioned that answering questions on Google Groups may be equivalent to answering questions on Yahoo Answers. Since neither of these services gives DOfollow links, the SEO value of answering questions would be to generate organic traffic to your website/blog. Yahoo Answers provides this result effectively, as when someone types a keyword related questions into Google Yahoo Answers has strong PR and often shows up in the first 10 entries on the search results page.

My question is, does Google Groups provide the same results? I can’t remember ever seeing an answer in Google Groups popping up on a search results page, while I have many times seen a Yahoo Answers page pop up.

There are lot of discussions in Google groups but they are not appearing in search results please tune ( improve SEO ) your Google group pages so that they appear frequently on search results which inturn help many people to find solution to their problems.